635 Ashbury Street — Janis Joplin's Haight-Ashbury Home

Janis Joplin lived at 635 Ashbury Street during the explosive Summer of Love in 1967, right around the corner from the Grateful Dead's house at 710 Ashbury. She had arrived in San Francisco from Texas the previous year at the invitation of Chet Helms, who recruited her to front Big Brother and the Holding Company. The Haight-Ashbury neighbourhood was the epicentre of the counterculture, and Joplin threw herself into it completely — the music, the drugs, the communal living, the sense that everything was possible.

It was during her time living on Ashbury Street that Joplin and Big Brother and the Holding Company played the Monterey Pop Festival in June 1967. Her performance of "Ball and Chain" was a revelation — raw, desperate, and utterly electrifying. It made her a star virtually overnight. The band became regulars at the Avalon Ballroom and the Fillmore, and the Haight-Ashbury house was where Joplin returned after those legendary sets, often with a bottle of Southern Comfort in hand.

635 Ashbury Street is a private residence in what remains one of San Francisco's most iconic neighbourhoods. The Victorian house looks much as it did in the late 1960s. There is no official plaque, but the address is well known to music fans walking the Haight. The Grateful Dead house at 710 Ashbury, just a few doors up the hill, is similarly unmarked but frequently photographed. The neighbourhood retains much of its bohemian character, with vintage shops and murals lining Haight Street a block away.